Guide to GIS for Public Gardens: Botanical Gardens, Zoos, and Parks

Guide to GIS for Public Gardens: Botanical Gardens, Zoos, and Parks TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE 1 What is GIS? CHAPTER TWO 7 GIS at Public Gardens CHAPTER THREE 17 Is GIS Right for Your Garden? CHAPTER FOUR 21 GIS Project Planning CHAPTER FIVE 35 Recruiting and Training Staff CHAPTER SIX 39 Building the GIS CHAPTER SEVEN 47 Data Collection CHAPTER EIGHT 59 Map Publishing CHAPTER NINE 69 Disseminating Your Data FOREWORD About 380,000 species of land plants have been named (1, 2), with an estimated 75,000 more awaiting discovery and description. The great majority of them are poorly known, often from a few preserved collections only. Worldwide, scientists are confronted with an urgent need to identify, inventory, document, and understand the diversity of these plants, even as it disappears in the face of habitat destruction and global climate change. At a time of enormous global change, with a record human population of more than seven billion people growing by 200,000 net per day to an estimated 9.5 billion (3) by mid-century and demand for consumption rising still more rapidly, biodiversity in nature is under immense pressure, and all available means of conserving plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms, together with their genetic diversity, must be applied as vigorously as possible. Museum collections (herbaria) are a critical reference tool for building a more complete knowledge of the plant world and documenting it. Despite their important role, such collections often remain undervalued and insufficiently supported to the point that they may actually be at risk. The living collections of plants in botanical gardens and arboreta are also of great importance for research and conservation but they are under-utilized for these purposes, with their value often not fully appreciated. Part of the reason lies in the fact that such collections are not well indexed, so that it is often difficult to tell whether an individual species is being cultivated somewhere and how that material was gathered in the first place. Because the climate is changing so rapidly that the numbers of many species are decreasing in nature and may be difficult to cultivate even in gardens in the future, botanists are turning increasingly to seed banks, where seeds or vegetative material is held at low temperatures (sometimes cryopreserved at -173°C with liquid nitrogen), where they may survive for hundreds of years. Similarly, the zoos and aquaria of the world hold a major fraction of the world’s approximately 50,000 species of vertebrate animals. Their collections, whether living or in museums, are generally better documented than those in botanical gardens, with information about zoo and aquarium holdings often online. The problem of recording data about these holdings in a retrievable form is analogous to that for plants, and the prospects for cryopreservation or analogous methods being successful far less than for plants at current levels of knowledge. The data problems of parks are similar to those of botanical gardens and zoos, with the methods outlined in this book applicable to recording and caring for their living collections of plants. Doing so implies the potential for collections of plants in parks too to play a role in conservation and research – the trick, again, is knowing where, exactly, specific plant species can be found. For plants, the situation is better than for other groups of organisms, with as much as a third of the world’s species currently protected within botanical gardens and arboreta, and about 20% of known species (non-overlapping to a considerable extent with the holdings of living collections) represented in seed banks. More than 3,000 botanical gardens and arboreta, along with hundreds of zoos and aquaria, span the globe and, as part of their core scientific missions, curate Alliance for Public Gardens GIS i documented living collections used for research and education and collaborate with one another and different kinds of scientific institutions on research projects that cross institutional boundaries. In addition to collection maps and inventories, botanical gardens and zoos also have a wealth of geospatial data, such as images, publications, key nomenclatural information, and links to museum specimens, closely associated with their living collections. Much of this data is currently tracked in paper files or as alphanumeric text in desktop-based database fields. Geographic information systems (GIS) can serve as an excellent tool for gathering, organizing, and sharing this scientific information and helping users find that data by linking it to particular specimens on “searchable” online collection maps and inventory lists. As geospatial data for these disparate but richly documented collections is captured within a standard digital infrastructure and linked via existing bioinformatics portals, new research opportunities will emerge. Likewise, once the single garden boundary ceases to be a limitation, new cross-institutional “collective collections” will be easier to imagine, build, and manage. This is already the case for a number of groups of vertebrate animals, where the world zoo holdings are documented for particular groups of animals and the overall genetic diversity can be monitored and maintained as efficiently as possible. Zoos and public gardens undertake conservation activities throughout the world. To illustrate this point, the most recent survey (2011) of 184 AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums reported participating in 1,719 conservation, research, and education projects in 97 countries or regions. Collectively, zoos and aquariums spent more than $160 million on conservation and research (4). Botanical gardens also have active worldwide research programs in biodiversity inventory, phylogenetic studies, seed banking, and critical in situ and ex situ plant conservation projects. GIS offers new opportunities to integrate geospatial information between field research projects and the ex situ living collections at zoos and botanical gardens. GIS maps can also be essential tools for geographic and taxonomic gap analysis of the botanical garden collection, helping curators identify and prioritize the most critical new specimens to acquire, as well as providing analytical tools— built upon worldwide range maps for native species— to evaluate top priority sites for field collecting expeditions and ultimately for different levels of conservation. Integration of GIS across the scientific enterprise will have additional impacts. In addition to their critical scientific functions, botanical gardens, arboreta, and zoos are also beloved by the public as places of respite, beauty and education. Nearly 200 million Americans visit zoos and botanical gardens each year—more attendance than the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball combined (5). Memberships at public gardens, zoos, and aquaria exceed 3.5 million households, with dues providing more than $100 million in financial support. Virtually every group imaginable is reached through garden and zoo education programs for families, seniors, teens, preschoolers, and special-needs audiences. In view of these visits, it can be seen that botanical gardens and zoos play a key role in educating the general public about plants and animals and helping them to understand scientific issues of public importance. The impact of global climate change on the loss of biodiversity, for example, is important for us all to understand; the exhibits, educational displays and events held in these institutions are important both in raising awareness and deepening understanding of the changes involved and their meaning for us. Investment in critical digital infrastructure, then, promises to impact all aspects of the educational potential of these institutions, delivering new tools for visual display of information to support compelling educational narratives that connect the local specimen with the global story and inspire audiences to take action on critical, urgent global issues. ii Guide to GIS This Guide to GIS for Public Gardens: Botanical Gardens, Zoos, and Parks, along with related online training opportunities, will help the botanical garden and zoo curators who wish to use GIS to map their plant collections more efficiently and effectively, link critical museum and environmental data sets via a geospatial framework, improve national standards of specimen curation and collection care, and permit both small and large gardens and zoos to participate in national and international scientific initiatives, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the NSF’s Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) Initiative. This book aims to provide support at every step in the process of mapping your facility and collections with GIS. To help with strategic decision making, the Guide to GIS for Public Gardens: Botanical Gardens, Zoos, and Parks provides botanical garden directors and other garden administrators with a discussion of the costs and benefits of embarking on a GIS program for your garden and considers other mapping alternatives briefly to help directors, facility managers, and curators assess if GIS is right for your garden or zoo. Most of the Guide to GIS for Public Gardens: Botanical Gardens, Zoos, and Parks is specifically aimed at curators and GIS project leaders who are ready to move forward to put a new system into place. Beginning at a very general level, the Guide provides staffing and training guidelines, advice on work flow, recommendations on how to find the right

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